Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

TiVo Time Warp Judgment Affirmed

Posted by timothy on from the when-patents-beat-sense dept.

zapakh writes "A federal appeals court this week upheld a lower court decision that accused DISH Network and EchoStar of continuing to infringe on TiVo patents.' This is a follow-on to a Slashdot story from October. Despite a 'Herculean effort' by EchoStar in redesigning its DVR software, the ruling agrees with the district court that that was not a major redesign of the software. The patent in question is titled 'Multimedia time warping system.' TiVo is pleased with the ruling."

17 of 107 comments (clear)

  1. Dump TiVo for MythTV by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    Pinch more pennies and ditch TiVo for MythTV:

    http://www.mythtv.org/

    If you're a geek and don't know about it, check it! We need more devices with MythTV preloaded on them.

    1. Re:Dump TiVo for MythTV by sakdoctor · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I don't think you're going to convince anyone here.

      TiVo Premiere XL is $499 ,and has about the recording capacity you would expect if you plugged for a middle of the curve HD.
      Now for service. $12.95 per month? How long do I intend to use this thing? Let's go for $399 which is for "life of the box" and assume that Tivo never go out of business.

      So I get $898 to play with. I need to spend a premium on quiet gear, and slimline cases, PSU etc. Then I can keep it forever, upgrade incrementally, and all the geek chicks will want to come to my place to admire my e-penis.

      Not a difficult choice.

    2. Re:Dump TiVo for MythTV by sakdoctor · · Score: 3, Funny

      But wait, there's more.

      TiVo want $59.99 for wifi. You're going to want wifi FFS!
      Then you will want a range of fanboi merchandise such as the $9.99 Tivo plush, $14.99 TiVo Folding Chair for watching your Tivo, $24.99 TiVo Slippers because you're not leaving the house.

      Finally at $24.99, the TiVo Duffle bag is large enough to bag up all this shit, take it to the dump, and realise what you really wanted was the MythTV with geek chick gang-bang.

    3. Re:Dump TiVo for MythTV by OzPeter · · Score: 2, Informative

      Tivo are dying, all the cable companies will let you have a box that records simultaneous HD streams ..

      So you are saying that even MythTV is a waste of time because the cable company lets you do all that stuff? You do realize that the cable companies offer you that stuff because you pay for it, and you don't pay cheaply

      --
      I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
    4. Re:Dump TiVo for MythTV by sakdoctor · · Score: 3, Informative

      Cablecard? Is that some sort of DRM device? I'm not familiar with US cable TV.

      I have a DVB-S PCI card for UK Freeview. There are currently no Freesat cards on the market, but I'll grab one when they become available. Freesat is unencrypted so I don't have to worry about that.

    5. Re:Dump TiVo for MythTV by click2005 · · Score: 2, Informative

      There are currently no Freesat cards on the market, but I'll grab one when they become available.

      http://www.hauppauge.co.uk/site/products/data_novahds2.html

      I bought one about 6 months ago but never got around to installing it (no dish).

      Freesat is unencrypted so I don't have to worry about that.

      I think the BBC is planning to encrypt their HD broadcasts. http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/sep/29/bbc-hd-encryption

      --
      I am a free slashdotter. I will not be modded, blogged, DRM'd, patented, podcasted or RFID'd. My life is my own.
    6. Re:Dump TiVo for MythTV by OzPeter · · Score: 2, Insightful

      there are a few ghetto channels that need a CAM, but I can't imagine anyone caring about that.

      If you are a cable company in the US then you care a lot about people stealing your product. And while by law they have to distribute the free to air channels (maybe 10 or so channels) via cable for a nominal fee ($15/mo in my case - which represents the entry cost into getting cable TV), my provider (Comcast) only does that in SD. If I want to see those channels in HD I need to either sell my soul to Comcast or have a CableCard enabled device. I could theoretically get HD over the air, but my local geography is such that I wouldn't get decent reception from the transmitters.

      --
      I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
    7. Re:Dump TiVo for MythTV by pongo000 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Pinch more pennies and ditch TiVo for MythTV:

      http://www.mythtv.org/

      If you're a geek and don't know about it, check it! We need more devices with MythTV preloaded on them.

      After several years of MythTV, the final straw was the removal of device support for my PVR-350. My time is simply worth more than the 20+ hours I probably spent over the years upgrading my MythTV box, hand-building device drivers, and dealing with other issues such as loss of audio.

      If you value your time, I would suggest MythTV is not for you. I finally retired the box and got a 3-tuner DVR. Proprietary? Yes. (Actually, Linux under the cover, but good luck hacking it.) But it works consistently.

  2. Maybe I'm not getting it right... by Deorus · · Score: 3, Insightful

    But I kinda recall doing that with my VHS, which had a button on the remote specifically designed to disable its transmitter thus allowing me to watch other TV channels as it recorded a specific channel back in 1990... How come this wasn't used to invalidate the patent?

    1. Re:Maybe I'm not getting it right... by clang_jangle · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Probably because this patent had the phrase "using a computer ". :(

      --
      Caveat Utilitor
    2. Re:Maybe I'm not getting it right... by dj961 · · Score: 2, Informative

      From the patent, in the prior art section "However, a VCR cannot both capture and play back information at the same time."
      While your button allowed you to watch and record, you couldn't rewind and record at the same time, which is what the patent claims. Things like instant replay are impossible with a VCR.

    3. Re:Maybe I'm not getting it right... by jmorris42 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      > Things like instant replay are impossible with a VCR.

      True, but all of the TIVO patents fall out as a self evident use of a non-linear storage medium like a hard drive. They didn't invent ANYTHING. They didn't invent computerized video capture, they didn't even exist when MPEG was standardized and they didn't create the all in one encoder/decoder chips they used. I saw ALL of that in the early 1990's when I first saw a video capture board in use, it was only a matter of having big enough hard drives to make capture and storage of video practical.

      So fuck TIVO directly in the mouth for their crime of attempting to game the patent system to hold up progress.

      --
      Democrat delenda est
  3. Does mythtv by Colin+Smith · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Automatically search the listings and record stuff I might like? It didn't the last time I looked.

     

    --
    Deleted
    1. Re:Does mythtv by TheJokeExplainer · · Score: 4, Informative

      "you insensitive clod!" is, of course, a reference to the 1986 Valentine's Day Calvin & Hobbes strip or The Simpsons episode Last Tap Dance in Springfield , wherein Frink exclaims to Homer, "I was merely trying to spare the girl's feelings, you insensitive clod!"

      --
      visit my pal the xkcd explainer!
  4. Thank goodness the UK is different by DaveAtWorkAnnoyingly · · Score: 2, Informative

    I'm so glad the system in the UK is different. We have a whole raft of time warping products available including the excellent Sky+. Now, i'm sure there are patents on much of the technology, thus protecting companies IP and encouraging innovation, however people are very free to come up with the same idea but implemented in a different way, or buy a licence and save on development costs and time. It's like Dyson and the hoover. The patent is on the cyclone technology, not on "the ability to suck dust up off the floor". Or have I missed the point and just continued the long and quite frankly boring by now patent argument?!

  5. Re:MPEG by russotto · · Score: 2, Interesting

    With all those references to MPEG in the patent, couldn't they simply use Ogg Theora (or some other codec) to circumvent the patent?

    Probably not as a practical matter. For ATSC (and DVB), the stream comes in as MPEG, which would mean you'd have to transcode to use another codec.

    Interestingly, MythTV doesn't seem to infringe this patent. The essential claims have steps where the streams are disassembled into video and audio, stored, and re-assembled on playback. MythTV doesn't work this way; it stores the program streams with the video and audio still interleaved, and disassembles on playback. I'm not sure why EchoStar couldn't use a similar technique; unfortunately, it's possible that the courts interpret the patent broadly and figure that difference doesn't matter.

  6. To anyone who thinks this is trivial by RzUpAnmsCwrds · · Score: 2, Interesting

    To anyone who thinks TiVo's patent is trivial: go read it.

    Implementing simultaneous recording and playback, with quick seeking to any point in the stream, and doing so with a very low-cost system (in TiVo's case, originally a 50MHz PowerPC) is not at all trivial.

    There's more than one way to implement such functionality in hardware, but TiVo found a way that was cheap and effective before Echostar did, and Echostar didn't bother to license TiVo's patent or find another method.